Song of the Fabulist

When I was just a whining wain
My life a parched and soundless plain
I thought some fame I'd chance to fish for
And landed more than I could wish for

I dreamed my letters to the past
Were answered, and a friendship fast
I forged with heroes of the lost age
Prior to my temporal cage

This guy could have been real. I read
A lot of books. Besides, the dead
Are fictions all: who gives a tup
If technically I made him up?

I liked him more than any real friend
Knew him better, felt that I penned
Something truer than mere fact
In that sense it was not an act

People don't forgive you much
Afraid to be too soft a touch
In a flash you're out of fashion
Blaze out bright and end up ashen

And in three hundred years or sooner
You're just another unproved rumor
Part of the past's abysmal teeming
Never known except in dreaming